Wolfgang Tillmans

In a 2017 radio interview, Wolfgang Tillmans said: “I am interested in making pictures in relation to a thirty-thousand-year-old history of pictures, regardless of the medium they were made with.”

Photography, in the strict sense, is only a small part of what can be imagined as a natural history of images, extending beyond human history. This dialogue with philosopher Peter Szendy accompanies the publication of the exhibition catalogue Wolfgang Tillmans. Rien ne nous y préparait – Tout nous y préparait. Introduction by Florian Ebner, curator and head of Cabinet of Photography at Centre Pompidou, Paris.

Goethe-Institut, Paris, 17 July 2025

Wolfgang Tillmans – Dreidimensional / TFAO is out now on all platforms.
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Wolfgang Tillmans’ new album, Build from Here, features on its cover a vaguely human form in a concrete clearing, hunched and hidden beneath a shroud of shimmering silver, the reflective material resembling at once a festive adornment and a mylar emergency blanket. Little about the dim setting is visible: it appears blank enough to be (or to easily become) a dance floor, and yet a compression sprayer and a ladder resting on its side suggest a construction site.

The image of a construction site—a space of desolation and possibility, ambiguously abandoned, ambiguously promising—is an apt one here, for this exquisite suite of Tillmans’ recent songs finds joy and heartbreak in ruin and rebuilding, and hopeful defiance in the face of uncertain, menacing futures. The songs are propulsive, catchy, contemplative, and stylistically various; lush and drumless instrumentals give way to ecstatic, danceable thrumming. But as the songs shift between ballads and club bangers and almost Gregorian devotionals, Tillmans’ voice remains the throughline, the album’s most precious material, whether growling and confrontational or heavily processed and chopped or bracingly bare and tender. His voice is powerfully expressive in each of these modes, all of which showcase a committed vulnerability, as if the name of his former music group, Fragile, were not merely descriptive but aspirational. As Tillmans chants over drummer Tim Knapp’s churning, tom-heavy beat in the brash “Grune Linien,” “for when I’m weak I’m strong.”

Even when his lyrics seem most rousing and declarative and assured, his delivery intimatesweakness, which in his hands becomes an ethic, a strength. In “We Are Not Going Back,” one can hear his voice wavering ever so slightly as he admonishes the listener (and perhaps himself) to “just hold on, just be strong, just be strong”; his delicate singing of this simple line shows his own unwillingness to dispense absolute instructions absolutely. In this context, the song’s title—which he repeats throughout the infectious chorus, along with the line “no turning back the clocks”—becomes less a declaration of fact than a declaration of resistance, a clarion call during a moment when so many clocks are being turned back. And on “Regratitude,” the song’s title hides a tension that his voice reveals: when Tillmans sings it, it sounds nearly like “regretitude,” as though he is considering the word from a less flattering angle. Meanwhile, the instrumental, with its pulsing synth arpeggios, bears many hallmarks of a late disco anthem, only the drums are nowhere to be found—the floorboards have been stripped, the building’s foundation revealed.

The album is driven by a desire to explore, to expose. He communicates this desire sometimes nakedly—“I wanted to tell you after a week and a half in your arms,” he sings on “There’s More That Connects Us”—and sometimes obliquely: the opening track, “Where Does the Tune Hide,” tries to discover “the tune” (and arguably succeeds), undertaking its search in the midst of “an endless sea of change.” “We’re fibers,” Tillmans sings, bringing to mind not only the inky, sperm-like forms that recur throughout his Abstract Pictures but also the complex organic material of which we, both individually and societally, are constituted.

If the record is uniform in one respect, it is in its insistence upon multiplicities—of sound, of presentation, of meaning—in an era of atavistic fascisms. Although Tillmans may sing, “We mean what we say / language is what it is / we mean what it says,” he simultaneously proposes that we mean so much more.

https://autre.love/journal/2024/2/22/wolfgang-tillmans-releases-single-and-music-video-for-the-track-we-are-not-going-back[]

Jochen Klein (1967–1997) was an artist whose work, both as a painter and social and political commentator, was informed by questions regarding the private and public, and the interior and collective, aspects of life at the end of the twentieth century.

Trained in painting at the Munich Academy, Klein began to question his relationship to the medium and its elevated position in art-making in the early 1990s, shifting towards collaborative work before returning to the canvas during the last few years of his life. After the Light is the first institutional exhibition that seeks to contextualize Jochen Klein’s work within the wider collective and personal preoccupations that characterized the lives and practices of the artists that worked alongside and with him.

While at the Academy, Klein shared his discomfort with the self-referential aspect of painting with classmates Thomas Eggerer and Amelie von Wulffen. When Klein relocated to New York City in 1994, he joined the pioneering artist collective Group Material, co-founded by Julie Ault. In 1995, Klein began a relationship with artist Wolfgang Tillmans and in 1996 they moved to London, where Klein returned to painting, producing his last paintings unaware that he had contracted HIV. 

The show presents the artist’s earliest works on canvas as well as drawings, watercolors and some sculptural experiments. A book of collaged men’s garments from 1992 offers a glimpse into Klein’s ongoing fascination with the not so straightforward signs of self-fashioning, desire, and masculinity at the end of the last century, which also emerge in his last works that combine collage and painting. The exhibition includes reproductions of documentation from Klein and Thomas Eggerer’s collaborative work, a letter about Klein written by Julie Ault, a landscape painting by Ull Hohn, and contributions by Thomas Eggerer, Wolfgang Tillmans and Amelie von Wullfen, selected by the artists themselves from the work they made around the time they knew Klein. Boyzone, painted in 1998 by Thomas Eggerer portrays a line of soldiers exchanging canvas bags during the Oder flood catastrophe of 1997, while Amelie von Wulffen’s warped composite interior from 2000 is reminiscent of how reality and memory do not always corroborate one another. Wolfgang Tillmans’ presents the last image of the Concorde series, photographed in April 1997 when Klein was still alive, enlarged in exhausted developer chemicals producing an arcadia like dreamy landscape strangely akin to Klein’s painting.

Further information[]

It is the interpersonal with all its shortcomings that fascinates Wolfgang Tillmans. He sees the acceptance of the fragility that defines us as individuals and our interpersonal relationships as a strength. He uses failures, ruptures and fragility as an impetus to develop new processes. They point to the imperfect nature of our lives and reveal unsuspected perspectives on life's materiality. In this sense, 'Fragile' refers to the precious moments of life and the value of social and family ties, especially in times of social and political instability.

Tillmans's artistic work is based on an irrepressible curiosity, intensive preparatory research and continual engagement with the technical and aesthetic potential of the medium of photography. His visual language is characterized by a close observation that opens up a deeply humane approach to our surroundings. Familiarity and empathy, friendship, community and closeness can be seen and felt in his pictures.

The exhibition presents the multifaceted art of Wolfgang Tillmans and shows about 200 works from the years 1986 to 2018. The exhibition includes large-format prints, smaller photographic prints, sculptural objects and table installations, and also video projections and publication projects.

A touring exhibition organised by ifa – Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen[]

It is the interpersonal with all its shortcomings that fascinates Wolfgang Tillmans. He sees the acceptance of the fragility that defines us as individuals and our interpersonal relationships as a strength. He uses failures, ruptures and fragility as an impetus to develop new processes. They point to the imperfect nature of our lives and reveal unsuspected perspectives on life's materiality. In this sense, 'Fragile' refers to the precious moments of life and the value of social and family ties, especially in times of social and political instability.

Tillmans's artistic work is based on an irrepressible curiosity, intensive preparatory research and continual engagement with the technical and aesthetic potential of the medium of photography. His visual language is characterized by a close observation that opens up a deeply humane approach to our surroundings. Familiarity and empathy, friendship, community and closeness can be seen and felt in his pictures.

The exhibition presents the multifaceted art of Wolfgang Tillmans and shows about 200 works from the years 1986 to 2018. The exhibition includes large-format prints, smaller photographic prints, sculptural objects and table installations, and also video projections and publication projects.

A touring exhibition organised by ifa – Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen[]